Father and Mother
(From my Book: Art & Synchronicity as Daytime Dreams)

The prologue introduces the narrator, a boy named Tom Wingo, reflecting on his upbringing on a Carolina Sea Island in the low country of South Carolina. He describes his deep connection to the land and sea, where geography shapes both his wounds and his sense of home. From a young age, as a member of the Wingo family, he engages in hard labor like shrimping and crabbing, building strength and familiarity with the local environment—tides, marshes, sandbars, and the community of shrimpers. His childhood is marked by a blend of natural beauty, self-sufficiency, and lessons learned through experience, carrying the “sunshine of the low country” etched into his skin.
 
The Father’s Influence
 
The father takes a tough, strict approach to life. He stresses hard work, taking responsibility, and caring for nature. He teaches the boy real-life skills starting very young: the boy begins working as soon as he can walk, kills his first deer at age seven, and helps feed the family by age nine. A key event shows the dad’s firm rules about right and wrong—when the boy kills a rare bald eagle just out of curiosity, the dad punishes him harshly. This includes hitting him, making him eat the bird’s meat while he cries, turning him in to the sheriff for a short time in jail, and forcing him to wear a headdress made from the feathers to school as a public way to make up for it.
 
The feathers slowly drop off, like a shedding angel who’s been shamed. Through this, the dad teaches how to pay for your mistakes and bans harming the land, saying, “Never kill anything that’s rare.” The boy learns the lesson, swears off hurting eagles, and spots his dad’s dry humor in reply to the boy’s smart-aleck remark. Overall, the dad stands for a hardy, grounded set of values centered on survival, fairness, and protecting the environment through tough consequences and effort. In the story later, the father does something unimaginable to a rare, albino dolphin and displays a hypocrisy unforgivable.
 
 
The Mother’s Influence
 
In contrast, the mom builds a soft, magical bond with nature. She encourages imagination and wonder through stories and careful watching. She teaches the “southern way of the spirit” in its gentlest ways, sharing poetic ideas about the dreams of animals and plants—like salmon dreaming of mountain passes, copperheads of biting hunters, ospreys of diving for fish, and owls in the nightmares of their prey. She keeps her own inner thoughts private, never sharing her personal dreams with her children, but trusts them with her “dazzling evening songs of the imagination.”
 
Daily walks in the forest or garden turn into adventures of discovery, where she makes up fun names for creatures and plants: a monarch butterfly as an “orchid-kissing blacklegs,” a field of daffodils as a “dance of the butter ladies bonneted.”
Her close attention opens the “palace of wildness,” turning everyday outings into journeys of pure wonder. But listen to her carefully, you can hear the dance of nature as a struggle that always ends tragically.